Endcrawl, a dedicated SaaS platform for managing and rendering film and television credits, allows users to quickly and easily create and update end credits. Endcrawl’s founders are John Eremic — known in the industry as “Pliny” — and Alan Grow.

Pliny’s background is post, so it's no surprise that a product like this would grow from his experience. In fact, for eight years he helped run the New York City-based DI boutique Offhollywood, until it was sold to Light Iron/Panavision. He then took a job at HBO that focused on workflow. Grow was co-founder of iLuminate, which Pliny describes as a “tech-enabled Blue Man Group.” After that he was a tech lead at Roli, a London-based music company.

“We were a nights-and-weekends project for a very long time,” says Pliny, adding that word of mouth and being active in industry organizations has helped grow the business. “We had a day-to-day customer support team, but when it came to developing new features, our progress was slow. We knew we’d have to either sell the company or go full-time. So Alan and I set ourselves a hard date and gave notice last July. We were fortunate to close our seed round shortly after that.”

Here’s more of our conversation with Pliny, on Endcrawl and the tool’s development.

What led you to build Endcrawl?
Scratching my own itch! When I was producing DI jobs, everyone dreaded the end credits process. The vendor was unhappy because they had to juggle 100 revisions over email chains. The client was unhappy because the feedback loop was slow, buggy and expensive. After 20 revisions you’d get slapped with overages. Nobody liked this process. The whole problem seemed uniquely suited to a SaaS solution.

Let’s talk about SaaS. Why did you decide to go web-based?
We had to start by asking, “Who is the end user?” Most of our customers are post supervisors and film producers, which means they’re not driving tools like Avid or Resolve on a daily basis.

Another question was, “What problems are we solving?” A core challenge has always been quick turnaround. As a producer during the final post crunch, do you want to render a 250GB DPX sequence on your 13-inch MacBook? So we moved the render engine to the cloud and made it on-demand 24/7.

We typically see indie films making revisions six to 12 months after their festival premiere. Do you want to be chasing down a project file that lives on one computer somewhere, or just sign back in to Endcrawl where your project lives? The bottom line is Endcrawl lets you own and control the process, start to finish.

The SaaS solution makes it easy to fix typos, make revisions, etc.?
Yes. Another core problem we solve is keeping everything in sync. Instead of email attachment chains, you maintain a single master document. This lets you monitor your layout preview in real time, and you can kick out new video renders any time in minutes.

How fast are renders?
Preview renders turn around in minutes. Uncompressed DPX in about half an hour.

What does it cost?
Endcrawl pricing is flat, per-project. There is a free tier that offers unlimited preview renders. Other tiers range from $500 to $1,500, depending on what you need (2K or 4K DPX), and they give you unlimited uncompressed renders. We also offer bulk and educational pricing. We have annual licenses in place with post shops, title houses and several film schools.

What are some of the films that have used Endcrawl?
It’s been used on over 1,000 projects, but just to name a few: Moonlight, Dark Waters, The Report, Harriet, Honey Boy, Free Solo, Icarus, RBG, Late Night, 10 Cloverfield Lane, Beasts of No Nation, Sorry to Bother You, The Big Sick, Halloween, A Bad Moms Christmas, Ava DuVernay’s 13th, Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq and Oliver Stone’s Snowden.

We’ve also been used on dozens of studio pictures. Unfortunately, those folks often have strict marketing consent policies, so I can’t list them all here.

Who uses your tool, and at what point in the process do they typically get involved?
Producers and post supers, DI producers, editors and assistant editors. But at some point, a lot of other parties need to get involved: production companies, legal and credits teams at studios, title designers, DCP encoding companies, distributors.

What about title designers? Are you taking work away from them?
No, in fact our feedback from them suggests the opposite. The title designers we know want to focus on the creative, bespoke work of opening titles. The end titles were always something you had to throw on the bid. Same with DI houses, who want to focus on online, color and deliverables. Now they can farm credits out to the Endcrawl platform — or they can layer their own creative services on top of Endcrawl.

Can you talk about your investors? How big a role do they play?
Our lead investor, Earnest Capital, is so adamant about being not-VC that they literally registered the domain... not.vc. In the end, we gave up zero control of the company and gained valuable mentors and advisors from companies like Basecamp, Gumroad and Dribbble. And we have the freedom to run our company profitably instead of pursuing the hypergrowth model, if we choose. If you’re a founder raising capital, it’s a very interesting time. You’ve got options.

Sundance is in a few weeks. Do a lot of those films use Endcrawl?
Yes. As of this moment, 35 Sundance 2020 films are on our platform. And we always get a lot of stragglers during the last few weeks.

The indies like to cut it close?
Everybody likes to cut it close! I’ve seen wide-release films rendering furiously on Endcrawl while their “Opens Friday” trailers are running on TV. Endcrawl is a clutch tool.